This is a 17-minute video about bottled water in Canada. It is very interesting to think that the country with 25% of the earth's freshwater throws out 12,000 plastic water bottles every 4 minutes. What are the rest of us doing?
Last year the WHO announced in a report that microplastics in water were not a health threat and this started a discussion on this topic. Of course we don't know much yet, because we have only just discovered this potential threat to our health. Here is a BBC article on this topic. "And although the available evidence suggests the health risks associated with ingesting microplastics, and the chemicals associated with them, are minimal, the studies so far contain significant data gaps, which need to be corrected in future research, according to the report's co-author Jennifer de France.
"We need to know the number of particles that have been detected, the size of these particles, the shapes, as well as the chemical composition," she says.
So this report on the health consequences of microplastics is likely to be the first of many. Because microplastics are present not just in water, they are in the air, and in our food. In the next few years, the WHO would like to see a report looking at what this "total environmental exposure" means for our health as well."
Hopefully, you are being asked by your children about the reasons that school is closed. Of course at the center of this is a virus called coronavirus.
Not all of us did well in Biology at school so I thought these three short videos might help you answer your daughter and son's questions.
Take a moment and fast forward in your mind to a day in the future when your child, now an adult, looks back and talks about whether she felt truly seen and embraced by you. Maybe she’s talking to a spouse, a friend or a therapist — someone with whom she can be totally, brutally honest. Perhaps she’s saying, “My mom, she wasn’t perfect, but I always knew she loved me just as I was.” Or, “My dad really got me, and he was always in my corner, even when I did something wrong.” Would your child say something like that? Or would she end up talking about how her parents always wanted her to be something she wasn’t, or didn’t take the time to really understand her, or wanted her to act in ways that weren’t authentic in order to play a particular role in the family or come across a certain way?
Put another way, do our kids feel seen by us? Do they feel truly seen for who they are — not for who we’d like them to be, and not filtered through our own fears or desires?
Parents in the United States today feel increasing pressure to practice some form of “hyper-parenting,” a time- and resource-intensive style of child-rearing also known as helicopter parenting. Even though a majority of parents now see it as the optimal approach, hyper-parenting is mainly practiced by the affluent, who spend huge amounts of time and money in an effort to give their kids every possible advantage — from baby Mandarin classes and private oboe lessons to travel soccer teams and SAT tutoring.
Intensive parenting is problematic not only because of the pressure it puts on parents, but because some research suggests that all this exhausting parental striving may not be the best way to raise children. In fact, our research and experience suggest that raising happy, healthy, flourishing kids requires parents to do just one key thing. It’s not about reading all the parenting best sellers or signing your kids up for all the right activities. You don’t even have to know exactly what you’re doing. Just show up.
Showing up means bringing your whole being — your attention and awareness — into this moment with your child. When we show up, we are mentally and emotionally present for our child right now. Naturally, no one can do this for everyone all the time, but as we explain in our new book, “The Power of Showing Up,” the idea is to approach parenting being present and aware in your interactions with your child — and to make repairs when that doesn’t happen.
Longitudinal research on child development suggests that one of the best predictors for how any child turns out — in terms of happiness, social and emotional development, meaningful relationships, and even academic and career success — is having received sensitive, supportive care early in life. We believe the key element is an adult who supported the child by offering what we call the “Four S’s” — helping them feel 1) safe — where they feel protected and sheltered from harm; 2) seen — where they know you care about them and pay attention to them as they really are; 3) soothed — where they know you’ll be there for them when they’re hurting; and 4) secure — which develops from the other S’s so they trust you to predictably help them feel “at home” in the world.
In the world of intensive hyper-parenting, the third S — “seen” — often seems to get left behind. We all know we should keep our kids safe and secure, and most of us believe we should soothe them when they’re upset. But what about really seeing them?
You know the clichés of the dad who pushes his disinterested son to be an athlete, or the mom who rides her child to make straight A’s, regardless of the child’s inclinations. These are parents failing to see who their kids really are. If they happen occasionally over the course of a childhood they won’t make a huge difference — no one can truly see a child 100% of the time. But over time the child’s sense of not being seen can not only harm the child, but the parent and the relationship.
That sets up a heartbreaking reality: there are kids who live a majority of their childhoods not being seen. Never feeling understood. Rarely having the experience that someone feels their feelings, takes on their perspective, knows their likes and dislikes. Imagine how these children feel — invisible and alone. When they think about their teachers, their peers, even their parents, one thought can run through their minds: “They don’t get me at all.”
What keeps a child from feeling seen and understood? Sometimes, it’s when we see the child through a lens that has more to do with our own desires, fears, and issues than with our child’s individual personality, passions, and behavior. Maybe we become fixated on a label and say, “He’s the baby,” or “She’s the athletic (or shy or artistic) one.” Or “He’s stubborn, just like his dad.” When we define our kids like this, using labels or comparisons to capture and categorize them, we prevent ourselves from seeing them for who they are.
Even in our most well-meaning moments, we can fall into the trap of hoping our kids will be something other than who they really are. We might want our child to be studious or athletic or artistic or neat or achievement-oriented or something else. But what if he just doesn’t care about kicking a ball into a net? Or is even unable to do so? What if she has no interest in playing the flute? What if it doesn’t seem important to get straight A’s, or it feels inauthentic to conform to gender norms?
Seeing our kids also means being willing to look beyond our initial assumptions and interpretations. If your child is quiet when she meets an adult, you might assume she is being impolite and try to improve her social skills. But she may simply be feeling shy or anxious. Rather than immediately correcting manners, you should first observe where she is right now, and work to understand the feelings behind the behavior.
The point is to develop an attitude of curiosity rather than immediate judgment. When your toddler plays the “let’s push the plate of spaghetti off the highchair” game, your initial assumption might be that he’s trying to press your buttons. But if you look at his face and notice how fascinated he is by the red splatter on the floor and the wall, you might feel and respond differently. You might be just as frustrated about having to clean it up, but maybe you could pause and ask yourself, “I wonder why he did that?” If your curiosity can lead you to see him as a young researcher gathering data as he explores this world that’s so new to him, you can respond with intentionality and patience, even as you clean up his experiment. (And perhaps draw your own conclusion and put a towel down the next time you serve pasta.)
Each child is an individual. When our own desires and assumptions lead us to perceive that child as something other than who they are, we are unable to see them clearly. And if we can’t see our kids, then what do we really mean when we say we love them? How can we embrace them as the individuals they are?
In the end, truly seeing your kids isn’t about being some sort of super-parent. You don’t have to read minds or transcend your shortcomings or achieve spiritual enlightenment. And you certainly don’t have to drive yourself and your family insane trying to attend every available enrichment activity. You just have to show up, allowing your kids to feel that you get them and that you’ll be there for them, no matter what. When you do that, you’ll be teaching them how to love, and how relationships work. They’ll be more likely to choose friends and partners who will see and show up for them, and they’ll learn how to do it for others, meaning they’ll build skills for healthy relationships, including with their own kids, who can then pass the lesson on down the line through future generations. That’s what it means to see — really see — your children.
Then, maybe someday, they’ll sit down with you for that cup of coffee and let you know how grateful they are for the way you saw them for who they were, and for the ways you showed up in their life.
Criminals are making virtual connections with children through gaming and social media platforms. One popular site warns visitors, “Please be careful.”
Excerpt:
"His wife, Rhonda, compared the predicament to watching a child get behind the wheel of a car: “You have to trust them.” Ms. Marshall said it was also hard to ignore the potential upside of their son’s gaming. “He kept telling me, ‘Mom, you told me I shouldn’t spend so much time on computers, but I can get scholarships for this,’” she said. Still, there’s no hiding the dangers. Kristy Custer, the principal at Complete High School Maize in Kansas, helped design the curriculum used by many high-school e-sports teams. “Right now, in the curriculum, we have a section on, ‘If this happens to you, this is what you do,’” she said. “But we probably need to say, ‘When this happens to you, this is what you need to do.’” Dr. Custer said parents should react carefully when their children report encounters with online predators. Punishing the children — no more video games or social media, for example — could backfire by pushing them into even more dangerous places for their online activity. “You just did exactly what that predator wanted them to do — and drove them into the darker space,” she said."
Pathological consumption has become so normalized that we scarcely notice it.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 11th December 2012
There’s nothing they need, nothing they don’t own already, nothing they even want. So you buy them a solar-powered waving queen; a belly button brush; a silver-plated ice cream tub holder; a “hilarious” inflatable zimmer frame; a confection of plastic and electronics called Terry the Swearing Turtle; or – and somehow I find this significant – a Scratch Off World wall map.
They seem amusing on the first day of Christmas, daft on the second, embarrassing on the third. By the twelfth, they’re in landfills. For thirty seconds of dubious entertainment or a hedonic stimulus that lasts no longer than a nicotine hit, we commission the use of materials whose impacts will ramify for generations.
Researching her film The Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard discovered that of the materials flowing through the consumer economy, only 1% remain in use six months after sale(1). Even the goods we might have expected to hold onto are soon condemned to destruction through either planned obsolescence (breaking quickly) or perceived obsolesence (becoming unfashionable).
But many of the products we buy, especially for Christmas, cannot become obsolescent. The term implies a loss of utility, but they had no utility in the first place. An electronic drum-machine t-shirt; a Darth Vader talking piggy bank; an ear-shaped i-phone case; an individual beer can chiller; an electronic wine breather; a sonic screwdriver remote control; bacon toothpaste; a dancing dog: no one is expected to use them, or even look at them, after Christmas Day. They are designed to elicit thanks, perhaps a snigger or two, and then be thrown away.
The fatuity of the products is matched by the profundity of the impacts. Rare materials, complex electronics, the energy needed for manufacture and transport are extracted and refined and combined into compounds of utter pointlessness. When you take account of the fossil fuels whose use we commission in other countries, manufacturing and consumption are responsible for more than half of our carbon dioxide production(2). We are screwing the planet to make solar-powered bath thermometers and desktop crazy golfers.
People in eastern Congo are massacred to facilitate smartphone upgrades of ever diminishing marginal utility(3). Forests are felled to make “personalized heart-shaped wooden cheese board sets”. Rivers are poisoned to manufacture talking fish. This is pathological consumption: a world-consuming epidemic of collective madness rendered so normal by advertising and the media that we scarcely notice what has happened to us.
In 2007, the journalist Adam Welz records, 13 rhinos were killed by poachers in South Africa. This year, so far, 585 have been shot(4). No one is entirely sure why. But one answer is those very rich people in Vietnam are now sprinkling ground rhino horn on their food or snorting it like cocaine to display their wealth. It’s grotesque, but it scarcely differs from what almost everyone in industrialized nations is doing: trashing the living world through pointless consumption.
This boom has not happened by accident. Our lives have been corralled and shaped in order to encourage them. World trade rules force countries to participate in the festival of junk. Governments cut taxes, deregulate business, manipulate interest rates to stimulate spending. But seldom do the engineers of these policies stop and ask “spending on what?”. When every conceivable want and need has been met (among those who have disposable money), growth depends on selling the utterly useless. The solemnity of the state, its might, and majesty are harnessed to the task of delivering Terry the Swearing Turtle to our doors.
Grown men and women devote their lives to manufacturing and marketing this rubbish, and dissing the idea of living without it. “I always knit my gifts”, says a woman in a television ad for an electronics outlet. “Well you shouldn’t,” replies the narrator(5). An advertisement for Google’s latest tablet shows a father and son camping in the woods. Their enjoyment depends on the Nexus 7’s special features(6). The best things in life are free, but we’ve found a way of selling them to you.
The growth of inequality that has accompanied the consumer boom ensures that the rising economic tide no longer lifts all boats. In the US in 2010 a remarkable 93% of the growth in incomes accrued to the top 1% of the population(7). The old excuse, that we must trash the planet to help the poor, simply does not wash. For a few decades of extra enrichment for those who already possess more money than they know how to spend, the prospects of everyone else who will live on this earth are diminished.
So effectively have governments, the media, and advertisers associated consumption with prosperity and happiness that to say these things is to expose yourself to opprobrium and ridicule. Witness last week’s Moral Maze program, in which most of the panel lined up to decry the idea of consuming less, and to associate it, somehow, with authoritarianism(8). When the world goes mad, those who resist are denounced as lunatics.
Bake them a cake, write them a poem, give them a kiss, tell them a joke, but for god’s sake stop trashing the planet to tell someone you care. All it shows is that you don’t.
The act of reading and decoding text is a complex feat of the human brain. Mass literacy is a recent phenomenon, but so much of a person’s chances for academic and professional success depend on their ability to read.
But millions of Americans struggle to read and it’s often because they have dyslexia. An estimated five to 20 percent of kids are dyslexic but some don’t realize it. These students’ dyslexia go unnoticed and they struggle in school with feelings of inadequacy. Others fight to get basic services required by federal law. There are countless stories of dyslexic students who feel frustrated by their struggles with reading and act out in schools. It’s so important for parents, educators and students to understand the signs of dyslexia and find ways to help.
That’s why we published theMindShift Guide to Understanding Dyslexia. ReporterHolly Korbeyhas written extensively on dyslexia for MindShift and she’s created this guide to help deepen your understanding. It’s readily available as a41-page PDFthat's easy to print and make notes in the margins.
In this guide, you’ll learn about:
How to recognize dyslexia in children, including multilingual English Language Learners
Teaching techniques for educators
Helpful technology aids
How parents can prepare for an Individualized Education Program (IEP) meeting
How adults with dyslexia managed their education experience
"After years of headlines about air pollution, we’ve been misled on a few things about the world’s biggest environmental health problem. For example, we’re told that “PM2.5” – solid pollution particles measuring 2.5 micrometres or less – can pass through our lungs and into our blood stream.
But, in fact, the vast majority of them can’t.
We’ve also been told NOx gases – including nitrogen dioxide – are the biggest threat to health within cities. However, NOx is responsible for just 14% of deaths attributed to air pollution in Europe.
The biggest killer of all never makes the headlines, isn’t regulated, and is barely talked about beyond niche scientific circles (despite their best efforts to change that narrative): it’s nanoparticles.
PM2.5 may be too small to see, being roughly 30 times smaller than the width of a human hair. But it’s a relative heavyweight. PM2.5 stomps in at 2,500 nanometres (nm), while nanoparticles are 100nm or below. PM2.5 and PM10 (10,000nm) are killers in their own right, typically causing lung and respiratory conditions. Yet nanoparticles can reach, and wreak havoc in, any organ in the body. And because government authorities monitor PM2.5 by mass (million of nanoparticles may not even register a measurement by microgram) – their reports underrepresent the true risks.
The science of why we should be concerned about the total number of particles that we breathe in, not just their mass, has been known for some time. In 2003, Surbjit Kaur was a young researcher finishing her Masters at Imperial College London, when her supervisor suggested she join the Dapple experiment (the Dispersion of Air Pollution and its Penetration into the Local Environment). Kaur designed a personal exposure study, with a team of six volunteers “dressed up like Christmas trees” with various different air pollution sensors, and asked them to travel a set route in central London every day for four weeks."
............................................................................................................................."Within the same town or city, our daily exposure to air pollution can differ greatly by person, by mode of transport, by the routes we take. Most cities or countries measure this with a handful of stationary monitoring stations, which can only test the air immediately next to them. We don’t, however, spend our lives standing still.
“I still find it fascinating”, says Kaur, speaking to me from her Thames-side offices, overlooking the London Mayor’s office. “If you are introducing air pollution policy for the wellbeing of humans, and you base that guidance on data that isn’t relevant, are you really helping people or are you actually hindering?”
